Grizzly Analytics Blog

  A developer at Apple made a comment on Twitter about iOS5 including Face Detection technology.  He said very clearly that it was face detection , and in fact elaborated a little bit later (in a conversation about technology in MacOS) that it was face detection and not face recognition .  This was picked up by the blog 9to5Mac , and spread from there to other blogs.  9to5Mac reported correctly that the tweet referred to face detection, but then the story switched into a discussion of face recognition in iOS5.  Soon everyone was writing that iOS5 would have face recognition technology built-in. A few of these articles are here , here and here , but there are lots more. (Note, by the way, that some writers got the distinction correctly, such as this article .) The point is that face detection and face recognition are two very different technologies.  Face detection is finding faces in a picture, like when your digital camera draws a square around faces and tries to focus on the

What do the next few years hold for mobile location-based services?  The answer is: Lots of innovative features that can help people in their every-day lives. In March Grizzly Analytics subscribers   learned about a new trend: Location-based reminders.  The idea of location-based reminders started years ago, with Nokia's research on what they called location-based triggers . But in March we saw research by Palm (HP) in this area, and that led us to take a look at R&D by EBay, Microsoft and others, and also 3rd-party apps that implement location-based wake-up alarms for bus and train riders. As we all know, Apple introduced location-based reminders in iOS5 in June, validating the trend and giving it a huge Apple-shaped push. So what's next?  Lots of great things: Calendar navigation, location-based playlists and song selection (like playing the theme from Rocky when you run uphill), location-based phone settings (like switching to vibrate when you walk into a theate

News is traveling around the web and being picked up by the media: After a very short time in existance, Google+ already has over 9 million users, and will pass 10 million soon.  It's taking over the social networking space, on its way to beating Facebook and Twitter, and finally Google has a solid success in social networking. But is all this really true? To be clear, I like certain aspects of Google+ a lot.  Hangouts are amazing, Huddles are a great idea, and their location-based mobile features are probably the start of a revolution.  So I'm not bashing Google+ when I say that they may not really have the millions of users that people are talking about. My guess:  657,000, as of July 12. If you look at all the articles talking about how many users Google+ has, you'll see that Google isn't saying.  The numbers all come from some pretty complex calculations that people are making, based on how many Google+ users they see with certain names, how many U.S. citize

Everyone's weighing in with an opinion about Google+, Google's new social network platform.  I'm not going to rehash things that everyone else has said - for that you can look at what's being said in blogs and on Twitter - but there are a few points that are worth thinking about. I remember years ago seeing Doug Henning on Broadway.  He was a great magician and a great showman.  His biggest skill was getting everyone to look one way and not see what was happening somewhere else.  In magic circles this is called misdirection . I think that Google is pulling off a tremendous amount of misdirection with Google+.  Everyone's spending their time writing and reading about whether Google+ will beat Facebook or Twitter, and wasting hours trying to get a Google+ invitation.  In the meanwhile, there are some very significant things that noone's noticing: First, if you look at all the people who say they love Google+, you'll see that most of them love +Hangout

What are going to be the key trends for the mobile sector in 2012? This article quotes analysts from Strategy Analytics, Vision Mobile and Grizzly Analytics giving our predictions: http://blogs.jpost.com/content/2012-mobile-trends-commerce-product-ecosystems-location-integration ...  Three of the sharpest researchers in the industry, Nitesh Patel (Strategy Analytics) , Michael Vakulenko (Vision Mobile ) and Dr. Bruce Krulwich  (Grizzly Analytics) share their predictions for 2012. In short, next year will see mobile devices driving commerce, Apple and Google battling for ecosystem dominance and mobile location services more deeply integrated into our daily lives.... For more on the coming trends in mobile location services, see this Grizzly Analytics report .